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The French Dylan. Also Beatty, Stern, Johnny Rotten ...

Laetitia Casta as Brigitte Bardot and Eric Elmosnino as the singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg in “Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life.”Credit
Music Box Films

THE young Serge Gainsbourg is sauntering through Occupied Paris when he pauses before an anti-Semitic poster. In a moment its hideously caricatured Jewish face jumps off the wall to chase him down the street.

This scene, some five minutes into Joann Sfar’s “Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life,” signals that the movie, opening Wednesday at Film Forum, won’t be your standard biopic. But then Mr. Gainsbourg, who died in 1991, is not your standard biopic subject.

He is best remembered in the United States, if at all, for “Je T’Aime ... Moi Non Plus,” recorded in 1969 with his girlfriend, the British actress Jane Birkin. But in France he is a towering culture hero whose American equivalent is impossible to conjure: a chain-smoking, alcohol-fueled singer-songwriter with the musical importance of Bob Dylan, the literary reach of Leonard Cohen, a chain of romantic conquests to rival Warren Beatty’s and the smutty, provocative persona of Howard Stern.

The movie, which won a César (the French equivalent of an Oscar) for best first film, touches on all these facets, taking Mr. Gainsbourg from his encounter with the Nazi poster through the 1980s, by which time he has made love to several famous and beautiful women, had a heart attack, incited several controversies and fathered two children (the actress Charlotte and the musician Lulu). These events are accompanied by his increasingly eclectic pop songs and punctuated by regular visits from the Mug, a sinister-looking alter ego who offers assistance, advice and now and then a little shove in the wrong direction.

It was the reckless, intemperate, Mug-influenced Gainsbourg who first caught the attention of Mr. Sfar, well known in France as the creator of popular comic books and graphic novels. Growing up in Nice, Mr. Sfar, 40, watched the tousled, unshaven and often drunk Mr. Gainsbourg regularly appall television talk-show hosts.

Photo

Gainsbourg.Credit
Newscom

“When I was a kid,” Mr. Sfar said in fluent English picked up from years of playing Dungeons & Dragons, “Gainsbourg was the only French person on television with an attitude. He would be a mix of Dean Martin and Johnny Rotten. I come from a very observant, boring Jewish family, and when I saw this Jewish-Russian guy who had dated Brigitte Bardot and who was with Jane Birkin — the queen of England in my perception — I thought, ‘Maybe there is hope.’ ”

Although his admiration deepened as he came to know Mr. Gainsbourg’s music, Mr. Sfar clearly still identifies with his bad-boy side — what self-respecting comic-book artist wouldn’t? During a recent visit to New York, the witty and loquacious Mr. Sfar presented himself as something of a naughty child, an image rooted, he suggested, in the fact that when he lost his mother before turning 4, he was told that she was on a trip and would return only if he didn’t misbehave. By the time he was 6, he said, he’d realized that “it was useless to behave and maybe also to believe.”

Drawing and storytelling became his outlets. A great fan of movie monsters, he recalls cutting their pictures out of newspaper articles as a child and then redeploying them in film scripts of his own devising. “Frankenstein was always a good guy,” he said. “And all of them were Jews, of course. They were persecuted.”

It was a monster of sorts that inspired the Gainsbourg project. “The first thing I did, even before writing,” he said, “was call the crew of Guillermo del Toro, who had just made ‘Pan’s Labyrinth.’ I said, ‘I’m going to write something that will involve your work.’ The whole point was to make a movie with them.”

The American actor Doug Jones, who was the eerie faun in Mr. del Toro’s movie, underwent five hours of prosthetic makeup every day to morph into the Mug. Mr. Sfar noted ruefully that his creature was left out of the French trailer. “They feared it would frighten the audience,” he surmised. “But it’s essential to me.” Mr. Sfar said that he prizes the contrast between Eric Elmosnino, the French stage actor who won a César for his scrappy, realistic performance as Mr. Gainsbourg, and Mr. Jones’s stylized turn as “a guy from a Murnau movie.”

Photo

The director Joann Sfar.Credit
Robert Wright for The New York Times

Mr. Sfar’s regard for F. W. Murnau’s expressionism informs “Gainsbourg” in other ways. “Most of it was shot on location, but I did my best to make the whole movie look like a fairy tale,” he said. “We put lights on a dolly, and we moved it during the shots so we would have big moving shadows, like in Murnau.”

Mr. Sfar said that although it was his first time on a movie set, he felt comfortable with the crew because of the technical side of comic books. And, he said, “I fell in love with all the actors.”

One of them, Laetitia Casta, was initially reluctant to take on the role of Brigitte Bardot. “She’s such an icon,” Ms. Casta said by telephone from her house in Corsica. “I didn’t think I would be able to do it. And I didn’t want to do a caricature.” So she called Ms. Bardot, who encouraged her to say yes and offered behind-the-scenes coaching.

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Romancing Ms. Casta, Lucy Gordon (Jane Birkin) and Anna Mouglalis (Juliette Gréco) was easy, Mr. Elmosnino said by telephone from Paris. But finding Mr. Gainsbourg took some effort beyond just learning how to sing. Speaking in French, he said the key was realizing “that the character was Gainsbourg and also Joann and also me — a three-headed monster.”

The monster embodied by Mr. Jones had become just another colleague to Mr. Elmosnino by the time the shoot ended. “Playing opposite the Mug seemed normal to me,” he said. “But I think it takes the film to another place that I find really interesting and poetic and very true to Gainsbourg.”

Mr. Sfar said that was his intention, even when the film departs from the known facts. “The Gainsbourg family asked me to say that the whole movie is totally fiction,” he said. “But every sentence in it comes from Gainsbourg. It’s filled with lies, but they are his lies.”

A version of this article appears in print on August 28, 2011, on Page AR8 of the New York edition with the headline: The French Dylan. Also Beatty, Stern, Johnny Rotten ... Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe